Nationalism Resurges In Eastern Europe

Communism's Collapse Leaves Vacuum To Fill

KOMARNO, Slovakia — Are those Hungarian hussars, decked out in their flamboyant 15th Century costumes, really just celebrating the 1,100th anniversary of the Magyar arrival in Europe?

Or, as Slovak nationalists across the Danube worry, do the men on their little ponies have something more sinister up their silken sleeves?

Hungarian kings ruled Slovak lands for 1,000 years, and some 600,000 ethnic Hungarians today make up 11 percent of Slovakia's population.

"A parade of hussars all along our southern border--it's a clear provocation," fumes Anna Malikova, a thirtyish woman with a big office at the headquarters of the Slovak National Party in Bratislava. "Really. It's like laughing in our face. We can't just look the other way."

The rabidly pro-government newspaper Slovenska Republika sprinkled more gasoline on the flames last week with an editorial that referred to the Hungarian celebrants as "arrogant barbarians" and posed the question: "What if the Germans started celebrating the Holocaust--how would the Jews and the other nations of Europe react?"

Cooler heads are urging both sides to tone down the rhetoric, but the fact remains that in the vacuum left by the collapse of communism, the politics of ethnic and national chauvinism is rapidly reasserting itself as Eastern Europe's most popular bloodsport.

With the Soviet Union on history's discard pile, Europe in the early 199Os appeared to be on the verge of a heady new age. The freshly launched European Union was to be the flagship. A juggernaut of Western Europe's booming economies, the EU would gather in the new democracies of Eastern Europe and become a counterweight to America's preeminence. At least that was the theory.

Then came the first reality check: Yugoslavia.

Stoking grievances that dated back half a millennium, Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman and Radovan Karadzic rode to power on a ferocious wave of ethnic hatred and paranoia.

The nations of Western Europe dithered as this new breed of European politician refined the concept of "ethnic cleansing" and used mass rape as a military tactic to secure ethnically homogeneous mini-states for themselves.

Some scholars saw the breakup of Yugoslavia as the beginning of a three-way clash of "civilizations"--Roman Catholic Croats vs. Eastern Orthodox Serbs vs. Muslim Bosnians. This, writ large, was to be the successor struggle to the bipolar Cold War.

But now it appears that Europe is even more fragmented and fractious.

Nations thought to have vanished centuries ago have suddenly reappeared. Others that hadn't enjoyed a day of self-rule since the Middle Ages are noisily proclaiming sovereignty over "historic" homelands.

This has created two big problems. The first is the issue of borders. Each of these revived nationalities defines itself in terms of what it was and where it stood at the apogee of its power, even if that moment occurred centuries ago. Europe doesn't have enough room for all of these overblown national egos.

The second is the problem of national minorities. It seems that part of asserting your own national identity means lording it over those within your borders who belong to some other national group.

Newly liberated Estonia and Latvia gleefully make life miserable for the ethnic Russians who represent more than 30 percent of their populations. Not smart, considering the mood in Russia and the diminutive size of the two Baltic states.

Lithuania, too, goes out of its way to remind its Russians and Poles that they are not quite whole citizens. Ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Poles, meanwhile, are made to feel uncomfortable on each other's turf.

Yugoslavia, as if it did not have a full plate of troubles already, keeps things stirred up with the Albanians in Kosovo.

Greeks and Macedonians haggle over who is the rightful heir to Alexander the Great. Hungarians find themselves unwelcome in Yugoslavia, Slovakia and Romania. Romania still hankers after parts of Moldova (while none other than former Gen. Aleksandr Lebed claims the rest of it for Russia), and so on.

Western Europe is hardly in a position to preach, what with Northern Ireland and Spain's Basque separatists setting off bombs in the name of national selfhood.

All of this is acutely felt in places like Komarno, a handsome, 750-year-old market town that straddles the Danube about halfway between Budapest and Bratislava.

Although it sits on the Slovak bank of the river, more than 70 percent of its 110,000 residents are ethnic Hungarians. Shopkeepers greet you in Hungarian or Slovak, and despite the political sniping between Budapest and Bratislava, people in town generally get along.

At the John Calvin Theological Academy in Komarno, courses are taught in both languages even though the majority of students are ethnic Hungarians who speak the mother tongue.